SOSS: Save Our Social Security
3/13: Jim W. alerted me to this New Yorker piece. I listened to the “automated voice” version. It focuses on the reality of work as a caseworker in the SSA, as workers worry about losing their jobs and how people will cope without the services they provide. Hearing it does make me worry about the growh of working from home, an issue not just for SSA but many public, nonprofit and for-profit casework agencies, given risks to employee password security, confidentialy breaches stemming from household members overhearing or overseeing things, and so forth. Let’s not assume the system is perfect, and does not need change. But this is clearly the Trump version of Reagan’s efforts to slash the social welfare sytem. The New Yorker account cited worker concern about closing local SS field offices.
Last night, Rachel Maddow reported on the Trump administration/Musk threat to eliminate SS phone call ins, drastically reduced later in the day per WAPO. Now it will eliminate only the ability to use a phone call to change bank routing numbers for direct deposit, which causes a high proportion of all fraud. The long informative WAPO piece mentions this group: https://socialsecurityworks.org/.
3/12: An informed oberver alerted me to this CNN report. An informed observer asked me: Could we actually lose our Social Security, worry that our checks are not going to arrive? This beat, one of about 20 of the Beats on my personal substack home page—views my own—will discuss this. Stay tuned. From an informed observer, see this from Rolling Stone. And this from Thom Hartmann at TNR.
What are we seeing? We are seeing the costs of organized nihilism. Since last fall I’ve been working on review essay on that and I want to release it now on my free substack pending later editing and publication in some other venue: https://tinyurl.com/FoilesAndBrownReviewEssay and in a linke from Other Words on my home page.
Colleagues, here is a webinar for/with federal workers from Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper in Colorado:
A title might be: the cost of chaos. See
and Civil Service Strong.
https://www.civilservicestrong.org/
I have not had a chance to listen to this, but check it out.