Whom do you believe? Do you still believe Donald Trump? He wanted to take away Obamacare and not replace it. What do you think that would have done to the average family? For 30 million average families…forget those on Medicaid or Medicare…just average working families? It would have been a disaster.
Trump and the Republican Neo-Fascists now want to give huge tax cuts to billionaires, enormous tax cuts. To pay for them, the Republicans have introduced cuts to Social Security and Medicare into the 2018 budget.
How about Bernie Sanders? Do you believe him? He said the same things on the campaign trail as Trump, only he meant them. He told the truth about what he would do. Tax the rich. Improve Social Security and Medicare. Improve Obamacare and move towards universal health care. End the wrong kinds of trade deals. Create jobs. Improve living conditions…housing, schools, roads, hospitals…for all Americans. Here’s what he says about Trump:
As Sanders points out, Trump sold the American people on the lie that he would do exactly what Sanders said truthfully that he would do…and has done in the past….for American citizens. The big lie is important. No President or Senator, Governor or Mayor should ever be elected on a lie…but least of all our President! But Trump is not the only one lying.
While Trump wants to cut his taxes and reduce your Social Security and Medicare payments, he can’t do it alone. These are benefits, by the way, that you paid for. They are only “entitlements” in the sense that, as any good customer, you are entitled to get what you paid for and we all pay with a lifetime of payroll deductions.But this lie is not the end of the problem. The problem is larger and more dangerous than Trump and his immediate Cabinet alone. The problem is Congress.
You see, Trump has aligned himself with every Right Wing, Neo-Fascist Congressman and Senator in Congress. And they are the majority. In addition, he has brought into his Cabinet the worst of the worst on the environment, labor relations, diplomacy, health care, education and even, to some degree, the military. Some of the military, like General Mike Flynn, for example, simply ignored basic written rules of government…important rules dealing with other nations.
Because Trump has shown already that he is willing go far beyond the ruthless approaches of even the worst of the Tea Party billionaire-hired thugs, many Neo-Fascists have been emboldened to seek other trinkets from our Right Wing legislators. We will see more pollution, more buying up of public lands set aside with decades and decades of hard work by civic minded individuals, including some of our oldest and wealthiest families. We must prepare for a gutting of all government services, privatization and sell-offs of others.
All the while, you will be told that it is “government’s” fault, neglecting to tell you that it was the government of Ronald Reagan, that of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and now Trump and the current Republicans who spent more by $2 trillion, $2 trillion, and, get ready…$12 trillion…before Trump, a total of $18 trillion taken from government and given to billionaires in tax cuts, in just those Republican administrations, including the $4 trillion left to President Obama by the Bush-Cheney Depression in the first four years of his administration.
It is not difficult to imagine. It starts with small lies. The justification for lower taxes on the very rich will be that we must increase productivity to create more new jobs. That’s the first lie. Of course, any proposed tax cuts are already structured to benefit the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations. This primarily means Wall Street types. (That’s where the money is being earned these days–investment companies and banks.)
You will hear more about problems with society. This is how it is done. The country is in “crisis.” Illegal immigrants. Crime. Blacks. Muslims. Terrorists. Any small or imagined problem will be amplified through the Right Wing megaphone…the hundreds of paid Right Wing radio hosts that keep up an incessant bombardment of lies for the the top 1%.
The vast majority of the problems you will hear are not real. They are primarily exaggerated claims…”our country is in a crisis” or “…on the brink of disaster.” Really? Schools are open. Military is being fed and housed. Hospitals are in better shape than in the last 30 years, and people get better care, if they can get it. What specifically is the “crisis?” It is simple to explain. But there are two explanations. One false and one true.
The first is false. That there are external threats to the United States that we cannot control. We have excellent diplomatic relations, unless we spoil them again with belligerent unnecessary wars, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did. We have ten times more military in almost every area than the rest of the world combined! We have a homeland security system now that works from Washington out to every tiny community in the country and an integrated intelligence network that has, until now, and with no reason to see any change, stopped terrorists here in their tracks.
But the truth is that our country is in crisis. Our people are in crisis. The Republicans have launched an attempt in the 2018 budget to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and huge numbers of other important services, including labor relations, working rules, transportation safety, toxic substance controls, and the environment in general. And there are more sinister plans.
Free speech and right of assembly, to gather to protest the removal of citizen rights, like the right to collect the Social Security you have paid for, or the right to medical care…this kind of assembly is a national right stated clearly in the Constitution. Since the days of the Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy demonstrations, we have seen more and more military equipment being sent to local law enforcement offices. Local law enforcement has been driven, because of increased poverty…one out of every 7 people is now below the poverty line (less than $23,000 for a family of four.) Police are on the side of government. That is what they are hired to do, regardless of their beliefs. They are there to maintain order.
We will have tax breaks for CEOs, who make not only hundreds of times more than average executives, but 40 or 50 times more than physicians, surgeons, obstetricians, and dozens of other very highly paid specialties so important to society, in medicine, science and technology. This is not a meritocracy any longer. Half of all our national wealth is inherited and the other half comes from trading pieces of paper, loaning money or leveraging the buyouts of companies, often using the bank savings of millions of Americans. Finance is double the size of manufacturing in this country, the labor on much of which is done in Asia.
It is time to decide whether those roughly 300,000 men whose tax bill, if raised another 5 percent or corporations, if taxed another 5 percent, and would barely, if at all, know that they had been taxed, or how much money they had been taxed or how much they had left, or where it was or what it would buy over a dozen lifetimes…and still have much left over….should pay a little more. And whether it is worth their inconvenience, because that is all it would be, in order to have hundreds of millions of Americans have decent lives and dignified departures from this world.
