Social Insecurity!
Well, it seems the Republicans can't wait this time to get their mitts on the U.S. Social Security system, and we all know that they ain't raisin' any taxes to help support the single most successful public policy program in U.S. history. They've always hated it, or rather their rich masters have but for many years it was untouchable. It was a program that helped too many people in too many places, and so no one enemy found it feasible to rise in opposition. That broke down in his century and now they hover over these safety-net programs like vultures. Medicare and the Affordable Care Act are the ones to worry about in the immediate future. America's medical situation is appalling with these programs in place, without them we return to barbaric. People will be hurt, and people will die as a direct result of elimination of these programs without a viable substitute which they themselves admit is only a "concept of plan". Americans have once again voted against their own better interests in the name of racist paranoia. It's too stupid to fully understand.
Rip Off
What's that line? "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." I've been seeing & reading a good deal about buyer's remorse from many who voted in the coming Idiocracy, and I still can't believe that so many were so lazy as to do no research, no fact-checking,, no investigation of policies (or the lack thereof in this case, other than hurting the most vulnerable to make a f of rich people even more rich). Frankly, it's difficult to feel much sympathy for them at this moment, when the American Experiment seems poised to fail - and not because of some outside enemy, but because so many Americans abandoned their civic duty to be informed, responsible citizens. The main thing that sustains me right now is my determination not to succumb to despair or surrender. This can & must be fought, both nationally & individually, in both large ways & small. But I already know that many people will be harmed and many of them will die long before their time because of the shallowness, the selfishness, and the willful ignorance of their fellow citizens who chose not to be citizens when it counted most.
ReplyDeleteWell said. I have hopes that our system of individual states will stall the ambitions of the incoming facists, as their desires will be blunted both in the courts and in state houses. From what I've read much of what they ran on getting rid of will be done chicanery -- just changing names and moving services around the system, so as to not alarm too many. The steps to shift out immigrants will prove much more difficult than they imagine and the popular will won't back it for as long as they suspect. The real fight will be in four years when he again will refuse to step down, but that's a long time when you're his age.
DeleteIn addition to re-reading Jack Kirby's Fourth World saga, I think a re-reading of Steve Englehart's Captain America story from the 1970s, the Secret Empire, is also in order. Never has it seemed more timely & urgent than now.
ReplyDeleteTragic but true.
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