Here is the real danger for 2016. We are at a tipping point. It is very likely that few Americans understand the calamitous potential of that single day in our history. Tuesday, November 8, 2016. There is a very realistic scenario that describes what could happen. It will happen only if we fail as citizens.
Imagine, if you will, that a “Republican” candidate is elected President. Assume that the Senate is not restored to Democrats. Election issues, wholesale voter restrictions and fraud abound in all the states where Senatorial elections were crucial. Now the Republicans control the House and Senate, and…let’s say that the outcome is a kind of Stephen King horror story—a Fascist-Republican is elected President. What can we know for sure will happen then?
Based on current and prior experience with the Fascist-Republican agenda, based on laws already on the books where they have had the power to enact them, we know that fifteen million more Americans will immediately lose their health care and rates on others will skyrocket. Forty of the fifty states will become back-alley abortion states. Taxes will be reduced on the top 5% of Americans with the top .1% receiving the greatest reductions. A strong warning will be sent to Iran, Syria, and Hamas, that the Americans are coming, that American (poor and uneducated) boys are on the way. If they don’t volunteer, we’ll conscript them. The country will hurtle towards bankruptcy, as Bush-era deficits will return. Local police will become more militarized and belligerent. (Or they’ll be asked to leave.)
More legislation will be written to send jobs overseas and more legislation adopted to allow Wall Street to become a free-for-all for the insiders. Despite complaints and attempts at reform, money is now speech. So the billionaire has a billion times more speech than you. “Corporations are people, my friends.” By the way, why was Mitt calling you “friend?” Mitt is not your friend. Come the Revolution and no one will be hiding Mitt in the basement.
How will the middle class do after this Fascist Election Day? That is pretty easy. Follow the already clearly accelerating trends—fewer manufacturing jobs, harder-to-get college educations, and more expensive. Wealthy families will join other wealthy families. There will be a slightly higher minimum wage but fewer jobs. Of course there will be severe reductions in food stamps perhaps abandoned completely. Social Security disability, unemployment insurance, public pensions and welfare of all kinds will be reduced for sure and, if possible, eliminated. This kind of legislation has already been passed in the House and attempted in the Senate. All that stands between the elimination of the Middle Class is one man–the President. If you look at the Fascist-Republican Budget, you’ll see what they intend to do. Not promises. Not campaign propaganda. You’ll see active legislation favoring the rich, and giant global corporations…not you..ready to be signed into law. The Fascists are merely waiting for the signature of an elected Fascist-Republican President.
We’ll see more private prisons. Here’s why Fascist-Republicans are promoting private prisons. Let’s say that you are a poor Black man living in one of the many Fascist-Republican states in this country. You get a $200 traffic ticket. Can’t pay it on the spot, so an additional $50 penalty is added. The $250 is paid off through a short-term loan specialist at 20% interest. Soon you owe $50 per month or $600 per year. When you cannot pay the ticket, you go to jail. In the private prison, according to state law, you’re charged for your daily keep. That is added on to your fine. Soon you, a person who could not even afford the excessive first fine, owe thousands of dollars which you must work off at fifteen cents an hour in the private state prison. You still don’t have a job because you were in jail and couldn’t find one…but you wouldn’t have found one anyway because there are no jobs.
Are we talking about Blacks, African-Americans here? No. Because this is already the kind of nightmare that Black Americans experience every day. This is what comes of being slaves and then being poor and then being the son of poor and then the grandson of direly poor and then the great-grandson in a society where just enough people have given up (and why wouldn’t they after three generations?) to create an under culture awash with drugs and violence and total disengagement of family structure to create places to live, walled-off merely by the color of your skin or the lack of a bank balance into real, live, dangerous “ghettos.” This is what comes of merely having a different shade of skin tone in a society of ignoramuses. No, this is not about African-Americans. This is about you. You didn’t care what happened to them, their oppression. Now that same oppression will be directed at you.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to cover all Americans. Medicaid, paid for 100% by the Federal Government, would cover the working poor. People with incomes below $27,724 for a family of three would be eligible for Medicaid. This would have, and does in the non-Republican states, covered virtually everyone. Of course, the Fascist-Republican governors decided to sue to deny the poor health care, even though it would be paid 100% by the Federal government. As a result, existing law outside the ACA, written in the past by Liberals, still forces these disgusting excuses for human beings to at least offer Medicaid to those with incomes under $8,840 for a family of three. The Bush-installed Supreme Court said that the poor do not necessarily need help to get adequate health care. That is what we can assume from the Supreme Court decision. The alternative would be to imply that the majority members of the current Supreme Court would simply let people die.
As of September 2015, 20 Republican governors were not covering those with incomes exceeding $8,800. Poor adults without children above the minimums, (which would obviously be less than $8,840) would also have no health care. None. Even if they could afford health care with premium assistance, they are not eligible. It is a Fascist-Republican scheme to kill off the poor. Just like the Jews of 1930s Germany, the ex-slaves of the early 1900s American South, and the Irish under British rule, the only alternative in such a brutish system is to somehow stay healthy until some job or some new venue offers itself to cover major illnesses or accidents–or die.
Who would apply such harsh measures to the national scene—bring health care terrorists to the Liberal states, in the same way as the Fascist-Republican governors have done in the South and in fringe Fascist-Republican states like Texas and Alabama? That is easy. At one time or another, every single Fascist-Republican candidate now running for President…that’s who! They all want to do away with the national health care system, rather than doing their best to hold costs high for the Middle Class and make it unavailable at all to the poor. Always remember when you pay your health care premiums that a full 30% of that bill and in some cases 40% goes to overhead. Those profits are being plowed by insurance companies into campaign funds for the Fascist-Republicans.
Profits in the health care business are intricately involved with other insurance premiums…the hugely profitable life insurance business, commercial and business insurance and major industrial insurance. So if you have a bill of $2000 per month for health insurance, it should be at its highest, $1.400 or less. That $600 per month differential is going to profit and a huge hunk of those profits right now are going to Super Paks to elect those who promise to do away with the Affordable Care Act. If you don’t care, or don’t need an extra $7,200 per year…fine. But many people object to paying 3 times what Europeans pay for care, which (like our Internet service) is sorely behind the times.
Losing your health care may not be the worst of the consequences of electing a Fascist-Republican. Do you want your sons or brothers to be involved in another huge war in the Middle East. Is the Middle East going to be another Viet Nam, or an extended Iraq, where 4,500 young American men, mostly poor and many not even yet citizens, died for one President’s vanity and a Vice President’s greed? The sons of the rich and the sons of Republican politicians do not make up the lion’s share of American fighting forces. Several Senators and Congressmen, to improve their own chances of re-election by the Right Wing, which is made up in goodly numbers of military contractors, encouraged their sons to enter the military. Others made sure that their sons, the Romney sons, for example, never saw the morning light through a barracks window. If you like war, if you like the idea of another 30,000 to 50,000 badly wounded and permanently scarred young American men, whose care as veterans the Fascist-Republicans have steadily denied, then vote for a Fascist-Republican.
Do you think that any one of the billionaire-supported, Right Wing, Super-PAC-funded candidates on the Right, or any Fascist-Republican candidate will go to bat for the American working man—for American labor? Under the last Republican President, they closed 70,000 U.S. factories and sent 5 million jobs to Asia. And as our society has grown, we—because of Fascist-Republican obstruction of jobs legislation—have not created enough new jobs. That is why the Republicans are giving limited lip service to increasing the minimum wage. They want more working poor…which is what people will still be on an increased minimum wage. They don’t want skilled workers or, God forbid, union workers. The Fascist-Republicans have worked with major corporations to insure that union membership is always prevented. The $7 billion union-busting industry…a separate, definable, distinct business category…is evidence of that. They kill unions before they get started, violate labor laws, delay implementation with months in court, find loopholes. In the meantime, workers fired or laid off indefinitely or blackballed in industry cannot hang on while industry funds the union busters.
There are no good Fascists and there are no good Fascist-Republican candidates. Anyone who would put you in prison for violating someone else’s idea of morality is a Fascist. Someone who would steal elections and then write legislation against the very people from whom they stole the election…is a Fascist. A bully and liar in politics, one who does so–not to restore real rights to the People–but to earn money from special interest groups. The legislators, overwhelmingly Fascist-Republican (over 99%) who, as members of ALEX, write legislation to pollute or reduce the quality of education or create hatreds between one segment of society and another. Do you see any on the horizon? Of course you do. They are the current Fascist-Republican members of the House and Senate and the current Fascist-Republican candidates, like Trump and Bush and Cruz and Fiorina and Christie and others. They want to take away your real rights. They want to make you adhere to their religion by removing the laws, state by state, that protect you from danger or from unlawful imprisonment.
The simple fact is this. The next “Republican” President could possibly be the last elected President this country will ever see. There were many who thought that Bush and Cheney, so completely supported by Fascists, might find a way to declare the kind of emergency that allows the President to take complete control of the country. It only takes one declaration. Hitler was made Chancellor, under the German system, because his party, while it did not have a majority, had a plurality—more votes than any other party. Other parties agreed to his becoming Chancellor. Within days, Hitler had laws written and signed in which he was declared dictator. After that it was not only imprudent, but illegal, a crime, to say anything against him. It was not already a Fascist society. It was a country that had seen clear elections, not always fair, but with several parties other than Fascists also winning large numbers of seats.
It was not a total surprise. Many Germans knew what Hitler was. He made no effort, not unlike Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or others in the Fascist-Republican Party to hide their racism, arrogance and hatred for the common man…or their murderous intent. Hitler wrote and gave speeches about it. Fascist-Republicans not only write about it, most of them have written or voted for anti-Populist, pro-corporate legislation. In Hitler’s case, Fascism was new. Many were bullied into supporting him. Others, like today’s GOP toadies and fools, were given advantages—they sold out. Still others were against him but were impotent against forces that they should have fought earlier and with greater vigor. One mistake was all it took—50 million people died over the next 12 years as a result of that one simple mistake, allowing a hidden monster to take complete control of a then democratic government.
If you give in to bullies, you will suffer. There is no plan from any Deity that says the United States, or Rome or the British Empire will rule forever. The quickest way to end it is to elect a President who has the potential to suspend the laws that people want, like gun control, like avoiding belligerent wars, like focusing on the education and health of future generations. A man who will serve the few, the rich, the powerful, will do whatever is necessary to win you over until he no longer has to worry about what you think or want or need–at all.
