‘No Kings' protest expected to walk, demonstrate during Saturday's Boston Pride parade
Rebecca Winter of Mass 5051, a group formed in February that claims to fight against authoritarianism, said they're organizing Boston's 'No Kings' demonstration that will coincide with the parade.
'No Kings' is a nationwide movement with thousands of demonstrations Saturday pushing back against the federal government.
According to their website, they say, 'They've defied our courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services. The corruption has gone too. far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.'
'Pride is and always has been a protest,' said Winter. 'We don't see this as a left versus right issue. We see this as an up versus down issue.'
The protests are being held across the country amidst continued chaos and demonstrations in California stemming from ICE raids.
Gary Daffin, an organizer for the parade at Boston Pride for the People, said he's been working with the leaders of the protests.
'We expect this to be a joyous occasion, joyous protest,' he told Boston 25 on Thursday. 'Our theme this year is 'Here to Stay.''
He admits that with the new administration and federal action involving the LGBTQ+ community, this year is more politically charged. The parade has often drawn counter-protesters, and they anticipate the same this year.
Boston 25 Security Analyst and former Boston Police Chief Dan Linsky said crowds can expect around 1,000 officers monitoring the protest and parade, working in tandem.
'Pride has gone off for the most part for decades in Boston without a hitch,' he said.
He expects vehicles to block streets and soft spots, while authorities monitor the crowds for any potential threats.
While he doesn't anticipate any problems, he's still asking all in attendance to keep alert and tell police if they recognize any threats.
Linskey finished, 'Alerting police officers can often be the difference between a tragic event or an act of violence.'
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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Los Angeles Times
a few seconds ago
- Los Angeles Times
Social Security turns 90 this week. Republicans are trying to keep it from reaching 100
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a clear mind about the value of Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935, the day he signed it into law. 'The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure,' he said in the Oval Office. 'We can never insure 100 per cent of the population against 100 per cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against ... poverty-ridden old age.' He called it a 'cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.' FDR envisioned further programs to bring relief to the needy and healthcare for all Americans. Some of that happened during the following nine decades, but the structure is still incomplete. And now, as Social Security observes the 90th anniversary of that day, the program faces a crisis. If there are doubts about whether Social Security will survive long enough to observe its centennial, those have less to do with its fiscal challenges, the solutions of which are certainly within the economic reach of the richest nation on Earth. They have more to do with partisan politics, specifically the culmination of a decades-long GOP project to dismantle the most successful, and the most popular, government assistance program in American history. From a distance, the raids on the program's customer service infrastructure and the security of its data mounted by Elon Musk's DOGE earlier this year looked somewhat random. Fueled by abject ignorance about how the program worked and what its data meant, DOGE set in place plans to cut the program's staff by 7,000, or 12 percent, and to close dozens of field offices serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries. This at a time when the Social Security case load is higher than ever and staffing had already approached a 50-year low. This might have been billed as an effort to impose 'efficiency' on the system. But 'a more accurate description,' writes Monique Morrissey of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, 'is sabotage.' That has been conservatives' long-term plan — make interactions with Social Security more involved, more difficult and more time-consuming in order to make it seem ever less relevant to average Americans' lives. Once that happened, the public would be softened up to accept a privatized retirement system. Get the inefficient government off the backs of the people, the idea goes, so Wall Street can saddle up. George W. Bush's privatization plan, indeed, was conceived and promoted by Wall Street bankers, who thirsted for access to the trillions of dollars passing through the system's hands. This was never much of a secret, but it simmered beneath the surface. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a July 30 event sponsored by Breitbart News, said the quiet part out loud. Referring to a private savings account program enacted as part of the GOP budget reconciliation bill Trump signed July 4, Bessent said, 'In a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.' The private accounts are to be jump-started with $1,000 deposits for children born this year through 2028, to be invested in stock index mutual funds; families can add up to $5,000 annually in after-tax income, with withdrawals beginning when the child reaches 18, though in some cases incurring a stiff penalty. I asked the Treasury Department for a clarification of Bessent's remark, but didn't receive a reply. Bessent, however, did try to walk the statement back via a post on X in which he stated that the Trump accounts are 'an additive benefit for future generations, which will supplement the sanctity of Social Security's guaranteed payments.' Sorry, Mr. Secretary, no sale. You're the one who talked about 'privatizing Social Security' at the Breitbart event. You're stuck with it. Plainly, an 'additive' benefit would have nothing to do with Social Security. How it would 'supplement the sanctity' of Social Security benefits isn't apparent from Bessent's statement, or the law. Still, we can parse out the implications based on the long history of conservative attacks on the program. In 1983, the libertarian Cato Journal published a paper by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, two policy analysts at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, titled 'Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy—i.e., for privatizing Social Security. From Lenin they drew the idea of mobilizing the working class to undermine existing capitalist structures. Cato's 'Leninist' strategy paper explicitly advocated encouraging workers to opt out of Social Security by promising them a payroll tax reduction if they put the money in a private account. IRAs, the authors asserted, would acclimate Americans to entrusting their retirements to a privatized system. They advocated an increase in the maximum annual contribution and its tax deductibility. 'The public would gradually become more familiar with the private option,' they wrote. 'If that did happen, it would be far easier than it is now to adopt the private plan as their principal source of old-age insurance and retirement income.' In other words, it would provide a backdoor for privatizing Social Security. (Germanis has since emerged as a cogent critic of conservative economics. Butler served at Heritage until 2014 and is currently a scholar in residence at the Brookings Institution; he told me in March that he still believes in parallel systems of private retirement savings as we have today, but as 'add on' savings rather than a substitute for Social Security.) Cato, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, has never relinquished its quest to privatize Social Security; the notion still occupies pride of place on the institution's web page devoted to the program. In 2005, when I attended a two-day conference on the topic at Cato's Washington headquarters, Michael D. Tanner, then the chair of Cato's Social Security task force, explained that Cato wasn't concerned so much with the system's fiscal and economic issues as with its politics. Its goal, he stated frankly, was to unmake FDR's New Deal. 'This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we've had since 1935,' he told me. 'We say that what was done was wrong then, and it's wrong now. Our position is that people need to be responsible for their own lives.' Yet forcing dramatic change on a program so widely trusted and appreciated is a heavy lift. That's why Republicans have tried to downplay their intentions. Back in 2019, for instance, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) talked about the need to hold discussions about Social Security's future 'behind closed doors.' Secrecy was essential, Ernst said, 'so we're not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future.' As I observed at the time, that was a giveaway: The only time politicians take actions behind closed doors is when they know the results will be massively unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich to pay for Social Security benefits? That discussion can be held in the open, because the option is decisively favored in opinion polls. Cut benefits? That needs to be done in secret, because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it. Curiously, Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to think that attacking Social Security is an electoral winner. Possibly they've lost sight of the program's importance to the average American. Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive half their income or more from Social Security. In the same cohort, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Notwithstanding that reality, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently asserted that delays in sending out Social Security checks or bank deposits would be no big deal. 'Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month,' Lutnick said. 'My mother-in-law, who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain.... She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month.' He claimed that only 'fraudsters' would complain. I had a different take. Mine was that even a 24-hour delay in benefit payments would have a cataclysmic fallout for the Republican Party. It would be front-page news coast to coast. There would be nowhere for them to hide. While bringing misery to millions of Americans, a delay — which would be unprecedented since the first checks went out in 1940 — would be a gift for Democrats, if they knew how to use it. Where will we go from here? The current administration has already done damage to this critically-important program. An acting commissioner Trump installed briefly interfered with the enrollment process for infants born in Maine—an important procedure to ensure that government benefits continue to flow to their families—because the state's governor had pushed back against Trump in public. In July, the newly-appointed Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, allowed a false and flagrantly political email to go out to beneficiaries and to be posted on the program's website implying that the budget reconciliation bill relieved most seniors of federal income taxes on their benefits. It did nothing of the kind. To the extent that Social Security may face a fiscal reckoning in the next decade, the most effective fix is well-understood by those familiar with the program's structure. It's removing the income cap on the payroll tax, which tops out this year at $176,100 in wage income. Up to that point, wages are taxed at 12.4%, split evenly between workers and their employers. Above the ceiling, the tax is zero. Remove the cap, and make capital gains, dividends and interest income subject to the tax, and Social Security will remain fully solvent into the foreseeable future. Trump and his fellow Republicans don't seem to understand how most Americans view Social Security: as an 'entitlement,' not because they think they're getting something for nothing, but because they know they've paid for it all their working lives. As much as the system's foes would like it to go away, as long as the rest of us remain vigilant against efforts to 'redefine a relationship between individuals and government' established in 1935, we will be able to celebrate its 100th anniversary 10 years from now, in 2035.
USA Today
a few seconds ago
- USA Today
The IRS has had six leaders in 2025. What that means for taxpayers.
Turnover at the top of IRS means fewer IRS agents, fewer audits and questions about implementing the new tax law The IRS is on its seventh commissioner of the year, has lost one-quarter of its staff and is faced with implementing a raft of new regulations. Whether and how this turmoil could affect Americans remains to be seen. But the first impacts are likely to be lower tax collections and a harder time getting answers to tax-related questions, according to a former commissioner and a policy analyst. 'You can be fairly confident of the direction of the impact, that having this level of instability is not good for IRS' core functions and for taxpayer service," said Alex Muresianu, Senior Policy Analyst at the Tax Foundation, a tax policy think tank. 'This level of instability coinciding with the implementation of a new set of tax laws ‒ that is a dangerous mix." 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The new administration almost immediately began mass layoffs and offered early retirements for federal employees, in an effort to downsize the government. A quarter of the IRS staff had left the agency as of mid- July, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Among the hardest hit positions are people responsible for reviewing and processing federal tax returns, and agents, who conduct individual and business audits. Other fired workers were involved in modernizing IRS technology or helping taxpayers by telephone. Werfel said the staffing cuts will impact customer service unless those people's jobs have been replaced by technology, and he said there is no indication they have been. Contact with the IRS is stressful for most taxpayers, Werfel said. Fewer employees means fewer people answering phones and responding to requests for help, fewer available inperson appointments and longer waits for audit results, he said. "The higher functioning IRS you have, the less stressful this is," he said. "If you're going to engage that bureacracy, you want it to at least work." Fewer audits means less revenue Conducting fewer audits means the country is collecting less revenue, which Werfel said should bother Americans worried about the national debt. "We should want our country to be fiscally responsible," he said. "The more money that we leave on the table that is actually owed to the country, the more that we have to put on the credit card at a high interest rate." For every dollar spent auditing America's highest earners, for example, the IRS reaps more than $4 in recovered tax dollars, research shows. Werfel said there is an estimated $700 billion in taxes that are owed each year but not paid, an amount he said could climb if the risk of an audit drops and there is less pressure to pay. "It creates an incentive for more people to break the rules and that means less revenue," he said. Implementing the GOP tax law The IRS and Treasury Department are rushing to stand up Republicans' new tax law. Lawmakers left it up to the agencies to fill in the details of the policy changes, many of which take effect this tax year, including sorting out specifics of how new breaks for overtime pay, tips and other provisions will work. Muresianu, the tax analyst, said taxpayers often need more clarification from the IRS when new tax laws take effect, and the call volume will likely be higher next year. 'If you have instability at the IRS, management problems at the IRS, and their ability to provide service declines, that is particularly bad if it's coming at a time where there a lot of people looking for clarity,' he said.
New York Times
2 minutes ago
- New York Times
Inside Trump's D.C. Takeover, and the White House Takes On the Smithsonian
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