Breaking Critical Promises Made to Working Women

My advancing age makes me think more about what
kind of
retirement lies ahead for me. I am more afraid now than I ever have
been
about the clock ticking ever faster toward the day when I will not have
the
resources to retire well and will have to keep working for someone else
longer
than I may want to or am able to physically.

And in the current political environment, with
growing
amounts of vitriol aimed at anything termed an "entitlement" program
like Social Security or Medicare, many of us who believed there would be
a
social insurance safety net in place for us as the bumps and bruises of
life
kept us from being independently wealthy leading into our later years
are
scared and rightly so. There are targets on our backs as if we have
somehow been slackers who see ourselves as "entitled" to something
we did not earn.

That offends me. That sort of thinking terrifies
me. I have worked very hard for more than four-and-a-half decades.
No slacking. I have been willing to do whatever it took to keep my
family
afloat financially. And no matter what, I have worked.

Like many women in my generation, I began working
outside my
home as a young teenager, and I began contributing to Social Security
and
sometimes when I could do so to other retirement plans. But also like
many women who work outside the home, I often worked jobs that did not
afford
me enrollment in retirement plans or have any employer contribution to
speak of
to those plans.

Additionally, as we have all seen in recently
released
studies, women still earn about 70 percent of what men do for the same
work in
the United States. That drastically and negatively impacts our ability
to
have the same benefits accumulated when we reach retirement age. Add a
few negative life events - a divorce, an illness, and unexpected trauma
here and there - and women face sometime total reliance on those social
insurance benefits - Social Security and Medicare - to which we
have contributed throughout our lives rather than have those benefits
simply be
a supplement to some private retirement funds.

So when Social Security and Medicare are targeted, I
am
targeted.

President Obama's debt commission has begun its
"bipartisan" work. Where have we heard this before? How did
women and working folks fare in their other bipartisan efforts? In the
latest
New York Times report, "Mr. Obama met
privately
with the commission members at the White House before their meeting at
an
executive office building across the street. In the Rose Garden
afterward, he
told reporters that he had insisted that everything be on the
negotiating
table."

I sure had everything
on the table
as I worked for my family. I left it all on the field, friends. And
there's not much left for me now. I will keep working as hard as I
can for as long as I can - and I hope as smart as I can - but I am
angry that the rules of engagement are about to change for me again. I
am
tired of trying to reinvent myself financially - time is running
out.

Like many other women, my husband is older than I.
In
recent years due to the collapse of his primary profession of machining
and the
collapse of his health, I have also become the primary breadwinner in
our
family. It is my employment that provides us our benefits; it is my
employment that pays the lion's share of the family obligations.
And within the corrupt and crumbling healthcare system, it has been my
income
and my employment that has had to protect my husband's failing health.
I have no retirement funds left - every penny of what we have ever had
has gone to keep my husband alive. I have worked hard to make sure of
that.

So when the President's commission looking at
entitlements decides to chop Social Security either by cuts to actual
benefit
payments or by raising the retirement age or both, I get very angry and
very
defensive. And when those on the panel want to puff themselves up by
cutting Medicare benefits, I shudder. The entitlement cutting these
Presidential appointees are lining up to endorse as if they are proving
they
are good stewards of my money are proving just the opposite. The cuts
are
a slap in the face and much worse for millions and millions of women in
this
nation and the cuts will harm us for generations to come.

Cutting benefits that will disproportionately
injure women
in their retirement years is wrong on many levels. Cutting benefits
upon
which a lifetime of working to protect others seemed worthwhile because
of a
safety net for me in the end is breaking a contract upon which I
significantly
relied. I suspect if I relied on the promise of Social Security and
Medicare to protect me from poverty and a quicker death in my later
years then
so too have millions of other women (and men) as we watched the
contributions
from our paychecks and trusted we were at least protected in that way.

Saying "shame on you" does not work when said to
those in the well-heeled classes of rulers in this nation who seem
intent on
selling some sort of fiscal conservatism and corporatism as a way to
honey-up
to the radical right or show themselves as governing from the middle.
There is no middle ground in breaking a contract millions of people took
seriously for decades as a hedge against suffering when we got old.

A broken promise, a broken contract, is just that.
We've already seen the horrible unfolding of the corporate agenda in
writing the health insurance reform bill upon which this nation's health
system will surely collapse in future years as costs continue to rise
and citizens
continue to go broke and die while insured and denied appropriate care.
Any system designed to be better for the few who have greater resources
necessarily harms women more. And we are certainly being slapped now,
aren't we?

I once asked a good friend and wise woman I knew,
"What do you think that feeling of impending doom is?"

She answered, "Impending doom." Clear and
simple. I have that feeling now.

Cutting my Social Security and cutting my Medicare
is
cutting short the years I may have left on this earth to enjoy life.
And
there are millions like me. There is no way to restore years of life
lost
once you do that to us. And I, for one, have no intention of letting
that
happen quietly. I worked too hard and cared too much for those around
me
to have "entitlement cutters" with no moral compass or sense of
social justice at all determine the quality of my life should be any
less than
anyone else's.

Everybody in, nobody out. Women in this nation
deserve
the "entitlements" we have worked for and relied upon. And if
you do not protect those benefits for women, you should stand
accountable to
the women injured.