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FEATURING ALEX LAWSON - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.
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Breaking ICE: Community Self Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. This week on Rising Up for Justice, our guest is Alex Lawson, the Executive Director of Social Security Works.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I gave the brief description of Social Security Works right now. Contrary to its name, it goes a little bit beyond the social safety net program that most of us hope we will live long enough to take advantage of. But let's start a little bit with the history of Social Security Works. When was it founded and why was it founded?
Alex Lawson: So Social Security Works was founded in 2010 to fight against the austerity movement that was happening at that time, mainly in the form of the BS Commission, the Bowles-Simpson Commission. That was a long-held dream of DC elites and Wall Street billionaires, is the so-called grand bargain, which is actually just a grand betrayal of the American people, and it's just a way of achieving Social Security cuts, which are deeply unpopular.
So they create undemocratic, unaccountable methods, a closed-door commission, to achieve those incredibly unpopular goals. And we were formed to shine a light on it. We were very little at the time, and I will just say, one of the first things I did was just stood outside the closed door with a cellphone, live streaming the closed door of the commission every week as they gathered, and getting little interviews as Paul Ryan and his ilk entered and exited, and that busted the whole thing open.
Alan Simpson, the late Alan Simpson got fed up with it, gave us an impromptu interview where he admitted that what they were doing was plotting on how to steal our Social Security benefits, and then we defeated that.
And there's a lot more history in there, but that is the origin story of Social Security Works.
