Today the US Senate passed a sweeping tax cut that, according to the Congressional Budget Office will add $1.4 Trillion to the national debt over ten years, will throw 13 million US citizens off health care insurance, and will funnel most of the money straight plutocrats’ bank accounts. This, while the United States already exceeds 100% debt-to-gdp ratio.
Average Americans aren't doing well. Nearly ten years after the 2007 financial crisis, mass poverty remains pervasive throughout the United States. It's so bad, the United Nations is conducting an investigation of extreme poverty and human rights abuses throughout the US.
With 41 million Americans officially in poverty according to the US Census Bureau (other estimates put that figure much higher), one aim of the UN mission will be to demonstrate that no country, however wealthy, is immune from human suffering induced by growing inequality. Nor is any nation, however powerful, beyond the reach of human rights law – a message that the US government and Donald Trump might find hard to stomach given their tendency to regard internal affairs as sacrosanct.
This is not merely bad policy. A decade after the GOP drove the US economy into the ground with unnecessary tax cuts and banking deregulation, they’ve done it again. So expect the same outcome: another asset crash, vast despair, the people shouldering devastation wraught upon them by an insane elite utterly divorced from reality. That same elite, laughing to the bank while impotent politicians throw up their hands as if it’s all beyond their control.
The immediate outcome of this legislation will cause millions of Americans to lose their health coverage. Leading to untold preventable deaths from minor ailments like diabetes and high blood pressure and other manageable diseases. But the GOP isn’t done. As they have repeatedly promised to do, they will end Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to pay for this disaster. Because — let’s be honest —that’s been their objective all along. As Bernie Sanders warns:
And when the next crash hits, without any social safety net to speak of, it will be mass homelessness. Mass famine. famine. Mass deaths from lack of basic services every other responsible government on Earth provides. All happening in the wealthiest nation on Earth.
And all merely to increase a few plutocrats’ asset funds.
This disaster shouldn’t be tut-tutted as just bad and overly ideological policymaking. An unfortunate outcome of poor voting. No. The American people were driven to this terrible outcome by being forced into one Sophie’s Choice after the next each election cycle. Driving us ever further toward anhillation. By those very same plutocrats who bought the elections with PR campaigns costing billions. With social media political targetting. With outright divisive lies.
What they have done are the actions of despots. No truly free people would drive themselves to penuary. We have been shorn of even basic human sustenance. And the world has been here before.
Do not compare the tsunami coming our way to The Great Depression. This time, compare it to Ireland’s Potato Famine. Compare it to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Compare it to Stalin’s Ukraine Famine, the Holodomor. Because that’s what’s going to happen when the US economy implodes once again.
What the Republicans have just done for their plutocratic patrons is a great crime against humanity. Many Americans will die because of this. Do not forget that. Remember it in every forlorn homeless and hungry face you see staring back at you. They are not worthless human beings. They are our sick. Our parents. Our children. And many of them will unjustly die.
Every US citizen, that is who these plutocrats’ targeted. And not one American will be unscathed by the whirlwind to come.