Tuesday, November 06, 2018
Your
Health, Social Security, and Safety Depend on Voting Democratic Today
If you want to cast yourself down into poverty and watch your
loved ones die for lack of health insurance, just go on voting Republican and
giving heartless bastards like Trump the keys to the kingdom
commondreams.org
Today’s
midterm elections are among the more fateful in recent American history, quite
simply because there is a madman in the White House whom the Republican Senate
and House have absolutely refused to reign in.
When
Barack Obama wanted to close the US gulag at Guantanamo Bay, where inmates are
held without charge for years, subjected to torture, and sometimes murdered,
the GOP Congress stopped him by passing a law that he could not spend
government money for the purpose of closing Gitmo. What Obama wanted to do was
reasonable.
The
Congress could likewise have put a stop to Trump’s *unreasonable* antics with
such laws. Instead they let him impose a racist visa ban, let him continue to
support the ruinous Yemen war, let him send 15,000 troops to the border with
Mexico in a boondoggle that will cost the public millions.
But
the big outrage was the “tax cut” scam of last February, which gave away $1.5
trillion to America’s super-wealthy over a decade and ballooned the deficit.
Mitch
“Darth Vader” McConnell immediately announced that because of the ballooning
deficit, which he single-handedly caused, Congress would have to cut
what career politicians in Washington DC call “entitlements.” They include
Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare.
All of
us who have had a formal salary have paid into social security. McConnell is
threatening to come after your government retirement benefits. That is *your
money* that the government is supposed go be holding in a kind of escrow for you.
The line the so-called conservatives try to feed you that Social Security is
broken or in danger of going bankrupt is a huge steaming crock.
The
rich don’t pay into Social Security on income over $128,400 a year. All you
would have to do is raise the cut-off for the super-wealthy and suddenly social
security would be way in the black and perfectly healthy.
But
McConnell wants instead to basically steal your money that you payed into it
and make you a pauper in your retirement, so as to throw even more money at his
filthy rich friends. The GOP represents the wealthy business classes alone,
whereas the Democratic Party represents the wealthy business classes plus
everyone else.
Mitchell
also wants to destroy what’s left of the Affordable Care Act and get rid of
protections for pre-existing conditions.
He and
Republican congressmen want to take these steps in order to receive big
campaign bucks from the business classes.
Republicans
in congress actually work for scumbags like Donald Trump, who finds ways never
to pay taxes on much of his income, but who are still afraid that for the
government to provide services to people is a bad thing, since it keeps in
place taxes on . . . the business classes. Those classes benefit from the
country’s infrastructure and airports and military security but they want to
make the middle classes pay for all those things so that they can play masters
of the universe with every extra penny they can save from taxes.
Most
of Trump’s antics are just offensive and cheapen the tenor of public life, and
cable news loves to gossip about all that.
He is
ruling by demonizing certain ethnic groups, setting American against American
and causing a spike in hate crimes. We’ve had mosques burned and
synagogue-goers slaughtered. That polarization will detract from your security.
But
the real threat of Trump is structural. He is vastly increasing the levels of
inequality in the US, throwing more and more money, through tax policy, to the
super-rich.
The
tax cut will also create an enormous deficit that the Republicans will attempt
to leverage into a final destruction of Social Security, Medicare and
Obamacare. Back in the 1930s the elderly were the poorest Americans, since most
of them had not saved enough and barracuda capitalism had crashed the market in
which some of them had invested. Now the elderly are generally speaking
relatively well off, because of Social Security and Medicaid.
If you
want to cast yourself down into poverty and watch your loved ones die for lack
of health insurance, just go on voting Republican and giving heartless bastards
like Trump the keys to the kingdom.
© 2018
Juan Cole
Because
of people like you, another world is possible. There are many battles to be
won, but we will battle them together—all of us. Common Dreams is not
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Juan Cole teaches
Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new
book, The New Arabs:
How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon
and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author
of Engaging the
Muslim World and Napoleon's
Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan).
He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator
on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written,
edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog
on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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