I am still utterly stunned that there is anyone in this nation who takes Donald at his word, let alone enough people to get him elected. And now, those of us who KNEW this would happen must clean up the mess created by the gullible and ignorant. Not very charitable, I realize, but coping daily with an existential crisis is exhausting.
The art of fiction depends on the willing suspension of disbelief. Trump's support of Social Security is the fiction. Stealing $1.5 trillion from SocSec beneficiaries to give America's wealthiest 1% new tax cuts is the plan. Be prepared to fight this massive crime.
I actually think not receiving their SS check will wake up all the people who either out off sheer fatigue or disinformation are not rising to preemptively protest all you correctly point out is likely to happen in the near future. Most people ( not Lutnick's mother-in-law) depend on that monthly check to survive, if you want to see people in Florida and Arizona have a change of heart, just be one day late with that check.
What I'm getting at is all of us are surprised/concerned that the level of outrage is. not commensurate with the impending threat. Whether or not it makes sense, I think the threat is not threatening enough ( either out of. ignorance or denial) but I'm pretty sure the very day a retiree does not receive their monthly SS check, the masses will rise up and the outrage will be cm
insulate with the actual harm inflicted by the Trump administration. The threat of a slap may be ignored, the actual slap stings.
With the anticipated thousands [million+?] of heroic protestors on April 5th (actually any and all days, including Women's March) here's an updated partial list of those fighting back every day [as of 3-29-25). I'm also adding courageous law firms who haven't caved. Besides upstanding lawyers, and law-abiding honorable (present and former) judges (including James Boasberg, chief judge, D.C. District Ct.), here's a growing list of Profiles in Courage men, women, and advocacy groups who refuse to be cowed or kneel to the force of Trump/Musk/MAGA/Fox "News" intimidation:
I'll begin (again) with Missouri's own indomitable Jess[ica] (à la John Lewis's "get in good trouble") Piper/"The View from Rural Missouri," then, in no particular order, Francie Garber Pepper (1940- 2025), Heather Cox Richardson/"Letters from an American," Joyce Vance/"Civil Discourse," Bernie Sanders, AOC, Gov. Tim walz, Sarah Inama, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Jasmine Crockett, Ruth Ben-Ghait, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Hayes, Ali Velshi, Stephanie Miller, Gov. Janet Mills, Gov. Beshear, Gov. JB.Pritzker, Mayor Michelle Wu, J im Acosta, Jen Rubin And the Contrarians, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Jay Kou, Steve Brodner, Rachel Cohen, Brian TylerCohen, Jessica Craven, Scott Dworkin, Brett Meiselas, Joy Reid, D. Earl Stevens, Melvin Gurai, Dan Pfeiffer,
Anne Applebaum, Lucian Truscott IV, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth,Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff, Jon Ossoff, Elyssa Slotkin, Tristan Snell, Delia Ramirez,Tim Snyder, Robert B. Hubbell, Ben Meiseilas, Rich wilson, Ron Filpkowski, Jeremy Seahill, Thom Hartmann, Jonathan Bernstein, Simon Rosenberg, Marianne Williamson, Mark Fiore, Jamie Raskin, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Schmidt, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, Andy Borowitz, Jeff Danziger, Ann Telnaes,͏ ͏Will Bunch, Jim Hightower, Dan Pfeifer, Dean Obeidallah, Liz Cheney, Adam Kimzinger, Cassidy Hutchinson--
American Bar Association, 23 blue state Attorney Generals, Indivisible. FiftyFifty one, MoveOn, DemCast, Blue Missouri, Third Act, Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Index, Protect Democracy, DemocracyLabs, Fred Wellman/On Democracy, Hands Off, Marc Elias/Democracy Docket, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, Lambda Legal, CREW, CODEPINK, ACLU, The 19th/Errin Haines, Working Families Party, American Oversight, Every State Blue, Run for Something, Jessica Valenti/Abortion Everyday, The American Manifesto
The Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
And, as Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together"--or via Jess Piper, from rural Missouri: "Solidarity." FIGHT BACK! WE ARE NOT ALONE! (Latest addition h/t , Robert B. Hubbell: Law firms, see below). All suggestions are welcome.
* Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling have resisted Trump, fighting back with the help of other courageous firms like Williams & Connolly. Per The ABA Journal,
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, representing fired inspectors general. (Law.com)
Hogan Lovells, seeking to block executive orders to end federal funding for gender-affirming medical care. (Law.com)
Jenner & Block, also seeking to block the orders on cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com, Reuters)
Ropes & Gray, also seeking to block cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com)
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, representing the Amica Center for Immigrants Rights and others seeking to block funding cuts for immigrant legal services. (Law.com)
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.
Wilmer Hale
Keker, Van Nest & Peters
Southern Poverty Law Center
Perhaps I should add our nation's motto--and on our Great Seal--the phrase "E pluribus unum" (out of many, One ). Ii's 13 letters makes its use symbolic of the original 13 Colonies which rebelled against the rule of the Kingdom of George III . . .And now we protest together against King Donald. As my rural MO. indomitable Jess Piper always says: "Solidarity"
Step 1: Break it. Most people, particularly most Republicans won’t even know until their check stops coming.
Step 2: Blame fed workers, Democrats/Biden, woke, and DEI. Republicans will believe it.
Step 3: Declare that only a favored company (owned by a favored billionaire) can fix it. Republicans will cheer the savior.
Step 4: Welcome to Liberty Retirement, the company that saved Social Security! They will revitalize the funding model by investing in Trump’s meme coin and Tesla stock. They will shrink and off-shore the workforce. They will deduct a 25% processing fee from every check. They will charge for every interaction with customer service as a “transaction fee”. And sure, you’ll be denied when you file, your checks will be late or go missing, but who ya gonna call, the CFPB?
The tip-off for me was when Musk announced that he and a team of developers were going to use AI to rewrite the Social Security data systems. In months.
To those of us with decades of experience in large-scale accounting systems, that translates to: “we plan to destroy the ability to send out payments from SSA. We will blame it on errors made when Biden was in office. Though we will say we’ll have a replacement in months it will be 3 - 5 years”.
What he is saying may sound plausible to non-technical people, but it is literally impossible.
The main accounting system is at least 60 years old. “Written in COBOL” sounds like a challenge, but that language has evolved a lot over the years, so it’s more accurate to say that it’s written in twenty different versions of COBOL. Thousands of modules. Some programming will be well-documented (english explanations of what the code is doing), some not only won’t have explanations but were written by poor programmers.
(Decades ago, as a programmer, I was on a team maintaining a commercial loan system at a very large bank. We detected accounting errors in a seldom-used function and I investigated. I found a module written by the world’s worst programmer. No documentation and a program containing 200 nested if-then-else statements (COBOL programmers are cringing). It took three of us, a whiteboard, and a week to tease out all the processing logic and make sure we understood all the processing possibilities). Any system maintained by generations of programmers will have lots of such anomalies.
And Musk plans replace this 50 million lines of code in months? No, this is a plan to destroy the old system and wait years for a new one.
Dan, if you have any influence with ranking members of the appropriate oversight committees, they must do all they can to stop this.
I'm surprised it only took you a week. I used to be a COBOL programmer and I know exactly what you mean. Nothing ever gets done as quickly, accurately, or cheaply as anyone says. That's why programmers will always have jobs.
I know everyone is overwhelmed, but this is a layup for Democrats. I live in a D+25 district, so my congresswoman felt pretty safe having a town hall about a month ago. I attended, and by far the most questions were about Social Security. (IIRC, this was around the time of Elon's "Ponzi scheme" remark, which made me think he does not know what Social Security or Ponzi schemes are). So this is a salient issue that is easy to understand and one Democrats are on the right side of. So although I think there are 3-4 issues every Democrat should be yelling about, this seems like an easy decision of something to prioritize and it could give them some leverage in the upcoming budget fight.
I totally agree! Dems need to make SS their top issue right now! Almost everyone needs it, and it will hit MAGA folks just as hard. The loss of it would also pretty much tank the economy. It's a no-brainer!
100% Dan. The democrats have exactly two jobs right now. 1) Make the impending failure stick to Trump/Musk/MAGA. 2) consistently articulate a clear and compelling alternative.
On number 1, I use this framework every day and twice on Sunday: Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley, fail-fast way of developing rockets usually and wastefully ends like this (clip of recent exploding rocket). Crucially those launches are generally unmanned. The Social Security rocket has 70M occupants. Don’t let him crash it.
I have heard from my children and grandchildren for many years that they don't think there will ever be a Social Security by the time they qualify for it, so they were never expecting SS to be there for them. Perhaps the first item for Dems is to make those generations believe they deserve it and should have it and by now many of those generations have already some investment they should not want to lose. Second, shouldn't the message be: This is not a present from the Government that can be taken back, this is YOUR MONEY which you earned and it has been put in trust for you to have when you need it most. I have just been reading a lot about how important "trust" is as a concept when folks are considering who to vote for, more important than a list of "policies" so a key message is to find ways they have trusted us in the past, certainly that is in strong contrast to what Trump and DOGE and GOP majorities are doing and have done, and that Democrats have and will continue to demonstrate they can trust us to be competent and compassionate leaders who will deliver what the people need from us.
One thing you can tell them for a certainty is that this scare tactic is nothing new. The enemies of Social Security have been telling young people forever that that the system is failing and that they’ll never see a dime from it. I heard that nonsense fifty years ago, and I bet that every other Boomer did too. And yet here we are—collecting the Social Security that “they” claimed would never last.
Musk is in SSA right now with dozens of his “engineers” planning a massive shift to an updated computer system that will be done in just months. Experts in government IT say such a shift of a system as massive as SS would take 5 years, that is if you want to do it carefully so that it doesn’t completely crash and potentially lose-forever-critical data.
Trump and Muck have broken the government's contract with the American people and have betrayed our trust. This is what we need to get across. (And BTW, Muck isn't even American, so he can take his bloody hands off our money and our data.)
"I know Trump and his minions will deny this til the cows come home, but they are also lawyers."
Of course, Trump is not an attorney ... I scratched my head over this sentence for a good five minutes, re-reading it several times, until I finally realized that Dan meant to write that "they are also LIARS"! Now that's a crazy auto-correct. And a clarion call about the need for a copy-editor.
Dan, you are so right! My siblings and I are all over 70 and receive SS retirement benefits. We are all now planning to sell off major assets in case we lose our SS checks. My husband and I will try to hold onto our primary home as we now house a daughter and her three young children who cannot afford separate housing. We are, frankly, terrified.
We will be marching in DC on April 5th and writing our Democratic Senators and Rep. to YELL LOUDLY ABOUT THIS. I have alerted all family members to do the same and find protest marches near them. They are all going to do so. I also belong to pro-democracy group NOVA Blue Squad, a chapter of Red, Wine and Blue, and our group is coordinating with the other RWB chapters in the area to converge on DC for the April 5th protest rally. My hand-made sign says: HANDS OFF MY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. (The other side says: TRUMP— YOU LOVE PUTIN? GO LIVE IN RUSSIA AND LEAVE OUR DEMOCRACY ALONE!!!).
"Trump" is convenient shorthand for the forces at work here, but notice that he wasn't even part of the now-infamous Signalgate. Other than signing executive orders, what is he actually *doing*? The rampaging Muskox gets lots of attention, but he's not the only billionaire in the room. What are, say, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the whole Project 2025 crew up to these days? The deportation drama plays to Trump's base because it targets people of color, but that is not the case with gutting Social Security and/or Medicare. Other than a few apparently nervous Republican legislators, has anyone on the right caught on to this yet?
Thanks, Dan. My concern is they will use the “starve the beast” technique - reducing the workforce causing missed checks and bad support so they can push privatization selling it as more efficient. Put the frog (us) in warm water and slowly turn up the temperature. How’s that for mixed metaphors?
We need to infiltrate Fox News and get the word out thru Fox. They only listen to Fox. The Boomers (I am a proud one) don’t get their info from social media influencers or Tik Tok, but the unenlightened ones do believe in Fox.
I am still utterly stunned that there is anyone in this nation who takes Donald at his word, let alone enough people to get him elected. And now, those of us who KNEW this would happen must clean up the mess created by the gullible and ignorant. Not very charitable, I realize, but coping daily with an existential crisis is exhausting.
The art of fiction depends on the willing suspension of disbelief. Trump's support of Social Security is the fiction. Stealing $1.5 trillion from SocSec beneficiaries to give America's wealthiest 1% new tax cuts is the plan. Be prepared to fight this massive crime.
I actually think not receiving their SS check will wake up all the people who either out off sheer fatigue or disinformation are not rising to preemptively protest all you correctly point out is likely to happen in the near future. Most people ( not Lutnick's mother-in-law) depend on that monthly check to survive, if you want to see people in Florida and Arizona have a change of heart, just be one day late with that check.
If it’s that broken when people “discover” the system isn’t delivering checks, who could they get to fix it in the next eighteen months?
What I'm getting at is all of us are surprised/concerned that the level of outrage is. not commensurate with the impending threat. Whether or not it makes sense, I think the threat is not threatening enough ( either out of. ignorance or denial) but I'm pretty sure the very day a retiree does not receive their monthly SS check, the masses will rise up and the outrage will be cm
insulate with the actual harm inflicted by the Trump administration. The threat of a slap may be ignored, the actual slap stings.
Especially after a whole bunch of us just got the so-called “Windfall Elimination” restored to our monthly checks.
EVERY SINGLE Red state!
With the anticipated thousands [million+?] of heroic protestors on April 5th (actually any and all days, including Women's March) here's an updated partial list of those fighting back every day [as of 3-29-25). I'm also adding courageous law firms who haven't caved. Besides upstanding lawyers, and law-abiding honorable (present and former) judges (including James Boasberg, chief judge, D.C. District Ct.), here's a growing list of Profiles in Courage men, women, and advocacy groups who refuse to be cowed or kneel to the force of Trump/Musk/MAGA/Fox "News" intimidation:
I'll begin (again) with Missouri's own indomitable Jess[ica] (à la John Lewis's "get in good trouble") Piper/"The View from Rural Missouri," then, in no particular order, Francie Garber Pepper (1940- 2025), Heather Cox Richardson/"Letters from an American," Joyce Vance/"Civil Discourse," Bernie Sanders, AOC, Gov. Tim walz, Sarah Inama, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Jasmine Crockett, Ruth Ben-Ghait, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Hayes, Ali Velshi, Stephanie Miller, Gov. Janet Mills, Gov. Beshear, Gov. JB.Pritzker, Mayor Michelle Wu, J im Acosta, Jen Rubin And the Contrarians, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Jay Kou, Steve Brodner, Rachel Cohen, Brian TylerCohen, Jessica Craven, Scott Dworkin, Brett Meiselas, Joy Reid, D. Earl Stevens, Melvin Gurai, Dan Pfeiffer,
Anne Applebaum, Lucian Truscott IV, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth,Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff, Jon Ossoff, Elyssa Slotkin, Tristan Snell, Delia Ramirez,Tim Snyder, Robert B. Hubbell, Ben Meiseilas, Rich wilson, Ron Filpkowski, Jeremy Seahill, Thom Hartmann, Jonathan Bernstein, Simon Rosenberg, Marianne Williamson, Mark Fiore, Jamie Raskin, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Schmidt, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, Andy Borowitz, Jeff Danziger, Ann Telnaes,͏ ͏Will Bunch, Jim Hightower, Dan Pfeifer, Dean Obeidallah, Liz Cheney, Adam Kimzinger, Cassidy Hutchinson--
American Bar Association, 23 blue state Attorney Generals, Indivisible. FiftyFifty one, MoveOn, DemCast, Blue Missouri, Third Act, Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Index, Protect Democracy, DemocracyLabs, Fred Wellman/On Democracy, Hands Off, Marc Elias/Democracy Docket, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, Lambda Legal, CREW, CODEPINK, ACLU, The 19th/Errin Haines, Working Families Party, American Oversight, Every State Blue, Run for Something, Jessica Valenti/Abortion Everyday, The American Manifesto
The Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
And, as Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together"--or via Jess Piper, from rural Missouri: "Solidarity." FIGHT BACK! WE ARE NOT ALONE! (Latest addition h/t , Robert B. Hubbell: Law firms, see below). All suggestions are welcome.
* Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling have resisted Trump, fighting back with the help of other courageous firms like Williams & Connolly. Per The ABA Journal,
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, representing fired inspectors general. (Law.com)
Hogan Lovells, seeking to block executive orders to end federal funding for gender-affirming medical care. (Law.com)
Jenner & Block, also seeking to block the orders on cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com, Reuters)
Ropes & Gray, also seeking to block cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com)
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, representing the Amica Center for Immigrants Rights and others seeking to block funding cuts for immigrant legal services. (Law.com)
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.
Wilmer Hale
Keker, Van Nest & Peters
Southern Poverty Law Center
Perhaps I should add our nation's motto--and on our Great Seal--the phrase "E pluribus unum" (out of many, One ). Ii's 13 letters makes its use symbolic of the original 13 Colonies which rebelled against the rule of the Kingdom of George III . . .And now we protest together against King Donald. As my rural MO. indomitable Jess Piper always says: "Solidarity"
Wow! What a list of America’s heroes!! Thank you!!
You're welcome. More to come
Also the Bulwark folks! Jonathan V Last, Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, Andrew Egger, etc... And the Lever folks too.
All added but Lever. Waiting.
Bulwark now on list. Last and Kristol to be added. Info on others pls. Lever folks> Thanks for reading and suggestions.
Don't forget Anand Giridharadas. I'm glad you didn't include Gavin Newsom on your list. He gets worse every day.
Don't know Anan G. Info pls. I agree on Newsom He blew it with his recent comments.
Larry, here is another hero for you: Jason Egenberg. He is perfectly focused on all the important points: https://substack.com/@jasonegenberg?r=qjf9i&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile.
Check Anand out here: https://substack.com/@anandwrites?r=qjf9i&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile. He is terrific. As for Newsom, in addition to his craziness about right-wingers, he is killing rooftop solar. I will never vote for him again.
Thanks!
I think they do want to privatize it.
Step 1: Break it. Most people, particularly most Republicans won’t even know until their check stops coming.
Step 2: Blame fed workers, Democrats/Biden, woke, and DEI. Republicans will believe it.
Step 3: Declare that only a favored company (owned by a favored billionaire) can fix it. Republicans will cheer the savior.
Step 4: Welcome to Liberty Retirement, the company that saved Social Security! They will revitalize the funding model by investing in Trump’s meme coin and Tesla stock. They will shrink and off-shore the workforce. They will deduct a 25% processing fee from every check. They will charge for every interaction with customer service as a “transaction fee”. And sure, you’ll be denied when you file, your checks will be late or go missing, but who ya gonna call, the CFPB?
The tip-off for me was when Musk announced that he and a team of developers were going to use AI to rewrite the Social Security data systems. In months.
To those of us with decades of experience in large-scale accounting systems, that translates to: “we plan to destroy the ability to send out payments from SSA. We will blame it on errors made when Biden was in office. Though we will say we’ll have a replacement in months it will be 3 - 5 years”.
What he is saying may sound plausible to non-technical people, but it is literally impossible.
The main accounting system is at least 60 years old. “Written in COBOL” sounds like a challenge, but that language has evolved a lot over the years, so it’s more accurate to say that it’s written in twenty different versions of COBOL. Thousands of modules. Some programming will be well-documented (english explanations of what the code is doing), some not only won’t have explanations but were written by poor programmers.
(Decades ago, as a programmer, I was on a team maintaining a commercial loan system at a very large bank. We detected accounting errors in a seldom-used function and I investigated. I found a module written by the world’s worst programmer. No documentation and a program containing 200 nested if-then-else statements (COBOL programmers are cringing). It took three of us, a whiteboard, and a week to tease out all the processing logic and make sure we understood all the processing possibilities). Any system maintained by generations of programmers will have lots of such anomalies.
And Musk plans replace this 50 million lines of code in months? No, this is a plan to destroy the old system and wait years for a new one.
Dan, if you have any influence with ranking members of the appropriate oversight committees, they must do all they can to stop this.
I'm surprised it only took you a week. I used to be a COBOL programmer and I know exactly what you mean. Nothing ever gets done as quickly, accurately, or cheaply as anyone says. That's why programmers will always have jobs.
I know everyone is overwhelmed, but this is a layup for Democrats. I live in a D+25 district, so my congresswoman felt pretty safe having a town hall about a month ago. I attended, and by far the most questions were about Social Security. (IIRC, this was around the time of Elon's "Ponzi scheme" remark, which made me think he does not know what Social Security or Ponzi schemes are). So this is a salient issue that is easy to understand and one Democrats are on the right side of. So although I think there are 3-4 issues every Democrat should be yelling about, this seems like an easy decision of something to prioritize and it could give them some leverage in the upcoming budget fight.
I totally agree! Dems need to make SS their top issue right now! Almost everyone needs it, and it will hit MAGA folks just as hard. The loss of it would also pretty much tank the economy. It's a no-brainer!
100% Dan. The democrats have exactly two jobs right now. 1) Make the impending failure stick to Trump/Musk/MAGA. 2) consistently articulate a clear and compelling alternative.
On number 1, I use this framework every day and twice on Sunday: Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley, fail-fast way of developing rockets usually and wastefully ends like this (clip of recent exploding rocket). Crucially those launches are generally unmanned. The Social Security rocket has 70M occupants. Don’t let him crash it.
I have heard from my children and grandchildren for many years that they don't think there will ever be a Social Security by the time they qualify for it, so they were never expecting SS to be there for them. Perhaps the first item for Dems is to make those generations believe they deserve it and should have it and by now many of those generations have already some investment they should not want to lose. Second, shouldn't the message be: This is not a present from the Government that can be taken back, this is YOUR MONEY which you earned and it has been put in trust for you to have when you need it most. I have just been reading a lot about how important "trust" is as a concept when folks are considering who to vote for, more important than a list of "policies" so a key message is to find ways they have trusted us in the past, certainly that is in strong contrast to what Trump and DOGE and GOP majorities are doing and have done, and that Democrats have and will continue to demonstrate they can trust us to be competent and compassionate leaders who will deliver what the people need from us.
One thing you can tell them for a certainty is that this scare tactic is nothing new. The enemies of Social Security have been telling young people forever that that the system is failing and that they’ll never see a dime from it. I heard that nonsense fifty years ago, and I bet that every other Boomer did too. And yet here we are—collecting the Social Security that “they” claimed would never last.
Musk is in SSA right now with dozens of his “engineers” planning a massive shift to an updated computer system that will be done in just months. Experts in government IT say such a shift of a system as massive as SS would take 5 years, that is if you want to do it carefully so that it doesn’t completely crash and potentially lose-forever-critical data.
I thought a judge ordered Musk et. al., out of SSA! What happened to that??
Trump and Muck have broken the government's contract with the American people and have betrayed our trust. This is what we need to get across. (And BTW, Muck isn't even American, so he can take his bloody hands off our money and our data.)
Sadly, your second point will resonate more than the first.
I know.
"I know Trump and his minions will deny this til the cows come home, but they are also lawyers."
Of course, Trump is not an attorney ... I scratched my head over this sentence for a good five minutes, re-reading it several times, until I finally realized that Dan meant to write that "they are also LIARS"! Now that's a crazy auto-correct. And a clarion call about the need for a copy-editor.
They are not all lawyers, Dan. I think you meant to write they are all liars.
Lutnick (affectionately referred to as Nutlick) remains the most obnoxious person in DC. Let ‘em eat cake!!!!
Nutlick. That's a good one.
Dan, you are so right! My siblings and I are all over 70 and receive SS retirement benefits. We are all now planning to sell off major assets in case we lose our SS checks. My husband and I will try to hold onto our primary home as we now house a daughter and her three young children who cannot afford separate housing. We are, frankly, terrified.
We will be marching in DC on April 5th and writing our Democratic Senators and Rep. to YELL LOUDLY ABOUT THIS. I have alerted all family members to do the same and find protest marches near them. They are all going to do so. I also belong to pro-democracy group NOVA Blue Squad, a chapter of Red, Wine and Blue, and our group is coordinating with the other RWB chapters in the area to converge on DC for the April 5th protest rally. My hand-made sign says: HANDS OFF MY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. (The other side says: TRUMP— YOU LOVE PUTIN? GO LIVE IN RUSSIA AND LEAVE OUR DEMOCRACY ALONE!!!).
"Trump" is convenient shorthand for the forces at work here, but notice that he wasn't even part of the now-infamous Signalgate. Other than signing executive orders, what is he actually *doing*? The rampaging Muskox gets lots of attention, but he's not the only billionaire in the room. What are, say, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the whole Project 2025 crew up to these days? The deportation drama plays to Trump's base because it targets people of color, but that is not the case with gutting Social Security and/or Medicare. Other than a few apparently nervous Republican legislators, has anyone on the right caught on to this yet?
Thanks, Dan. My concern is they will use the “starve the beast” technique - reducing the workforce causing missed checks and bad support so they can push privatization selling it as more efficient. Put the frog (us) in warm water and slowly turn up the temperature. How’s that for mixed metaphors?
It's already happening https://archive.ph/UkSsG#selection-1915.0-1915.239
What would happen to Medicare payment since it is withheld from SS?
Good point!!!!
We need to infiltrate Fox News and get the word out thru Fox. They only listen to Fox. The Boomers (I am a proud one) don’t get their info from social media influencers or Tik Tok, but the unenlightened ones do believe in Fox.