Thankful for Social Security

Thankful for the Social Security safety net that helps keep people from becoming too desperate. (And we all know that desperate people do desperate things).

THEN... there's Obama's so-called "Bipartisan" Deficit Commission, led by two people with a track record of wanting to cut Social Security, for which I'm not thankful.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow pokes a hole in the "we're living longer" justification for raising the retirement age. Just who are "we," people with low-paid hard-labor jobs and little or no healthcare, or people with high-paid desk jobs and good healthcare? Click Cartoon to Enlarge.


Sources:

Thankful for GLH Blog for the tip-off.

Thankful for Salon.Com for hosting Tom Tomorrow.

Women are Smarter....

I'm in "Challenge the Establishment" mode, and today I provide another strategic element. Women are at the front of the movement in Iran, and have been through out history.

The Greatful Dead knew it:

It ain't me
It's the people that say
Men are leading the women astray
But I say, it's the women today
Smarter than the man in every way

The People are hungry for real change, which is why they voted for Obama, a man whose words, and past deeds, resonated with that desire for changing the established system ... Unfortunately, the Office of the US President is not controlled by Obama, nor his senior staff... it's controlled by the establishment powers that helped put Obama into that office.

Can we change that? If so, how?

The simple answer is that "we the people" need to expose the illegitimacy of that establishment control and assert/insert our control. Simple in concept, yet difficult in practice.

This question of how to change the establishment power structure is at the root of so many other questions about creating positive social change. How? There is no silver bullet; however, women must and will play a central role if we are to succeed.

Examples across history demonstrate that women have the moral authority and courageous capacity to affect deep social change. This theme will be revisited in the weeks to come.