NOW members have spoken loud and clear: they want Fiscal Commission Co-Chair Alan Simpson out – and NOW President Terry O’Neill is ready to send him home with 1,500 baby bottle nipples.

On Wednesday, Sept. 29, at the next meeting of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, O’Neill will hand deliver nearly 1,500 baby bottle nipples from NOW members as part of its "Tits for an Ass" campaign calling for the removal of Alan Simpson.

In August, Simpson sent a petulant and insulting e-mail tirade to Executive Director Ashley Carson of the Older Women’s League (OWL), comparing Social Security to “milk cow with 310 million tits” and disparaging those who advocate on behalf of Social Security recipients as unable to “find honest work.”

“NOW’s 500,000 members and supporters responded overwhelmingly when we asked them to use our website or Twitter account to help us buy baby bottle nipples,” says O’Neill. “And I’m ready to deliver them to Mr. Simpson — as a going-away gift — when I urge him to have the decency to step down from the Fiscal Commission.

“The Fiscal Commission should be led by someone who will actually try to address the federal budget deficit, instead of using it as an excuse to undermine Social Security by cutting benefits or raising the retirement age,” O’Neill continues. “Alan Simpson is not that person.”

[Ed. Note: After Alex's encounter with Alan Simpson, the committee has apparently moved the meeting location without notice. Alex is trying to find out where it is being held.]

Streaming live video by Ustream
By Alex Lawson, Communications Director for Social Security Works.

This is the fifth installment of Social Security Works’ weekly livestream of the Closed Door Debt Commission. The best action is around 9:15 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., right as members of the commission are entering and leaving.

After last week’s livestream, there is little chance this week’s will be as exciting.

So let’s dwell in the past a little.

Read the rest of this entry →

By Alex Lawson, Communications Director for Social Security Works.

This is the fourth installment of our weekly livestream of the Closed Door Debt Commission. The best action is around 9:15am and 11:30am, right as members of the commission are entering and leaving.

With unemployment hovering around 10 percent following the worst economic collapse in 70 years you would think that members of Congress would be working day and night to get Americans back to work. You would be wrong.

The deficit fear mongers have done such a number on the thinking in DC that members of Congress think that when the American people say "we need jobs!" that they are really saying "cut my Social Security." But, I guess that when a billionaire Wall Street banker spreads $12 million dollars around town it can really confuse people.

So now we are faced with another DC closed door meeting where lawmakers are going to talk about what government services they can cut to placate bondholders (who in reality don’t need much placating).

Read the rest of this entry →

By Alex Lawson, Communications Director for Social Security Works.

This is the third installment of our weekly livestream of the Closed Door Debt Commission. The best action is around 9:15am and 11:30am, right as members of the commission are entering and leaving.

President Obama created the Debt Commission by executive order and immediately set the tone by appointing former Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.

These two picks sent a clear message; Social Security is on the chopping block.

Subsequent picks only heightened fears that the commission’s real task was to slip cuts to Social Security by a public that, for the most part, is unaware of the commission. Many of the picks have a "history of support for both benefit cuts and privatization of Social Security."

Sen. Simpson is famous for his animosity towards seniors, recently saying that for the commission to work, "You’ve got to scrub out [of] the equation the AARP, the Committee for the Preservation of Social Security and Medicare, the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panther, the whatever. Those people are lying… [They] don’t care a whit about their grandchildren…not a whit."

During the Clinton White House, Mr. Bowles was known as "Corporate America’s Friend in the White House." Only after the fact did it become clear that Erskine Bowles’ true claim to fame was as "the liaison between Clinton and Gingrich."

In his book, The Pact, author Steve Gillon reports that the biggest deal that Bowles was brokering was a partial privatization of Social Security alongside benefit cuts enacted by "raising the minimum age required for Social Security and for changing the COLA formula."

In a recent discussion, Gillon affirmed that from appearances it looks like the current commission is looking for the same "deal" as the Clinton-Gingrich "pact." And that Erskine Bowles is reprising his role as deal-maker extraordinaire.

The only difference between now and then, is that in Clinton’s time it was the budget surplus that was used to explain the need to "fix" Social Security, now it is the budget deficit being used to explain the same necessity.

Watch the livestream below from 9am-noon, Wednesday May, 19 2010.
Live streaming video by Ustream

I know that watching a closed door is not that riveting, so check out the highlights from the last two weeks here and here.

This week is the meeting of the Tax Working Group. See the membership of the working groups below.