Thursday, 10 May 2018 06:44
Trump's Newest War on the Poor
JIM HIGHTOWER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
hightower 5 10 18
Trump is launching a war on the poor. Gage Skidmore
Get ready, America -- here we go... to war! This kind of war is an affront
to the values that most of us hold dear, and this war is truly nasty and
evil: A war on the poor.
Generalissimo Trump (whose nom de guerre is "El Donaldo," the mucho macho
presidente of the USA) is personally directing the hostilities in this
assault on -- surprise! -- the U.S. Well, obviously not every American. He's
specifically mounting a war on our country's poor people, though he
euphemistically calls it a war of liberation. The purpose, he says, is to
"free" poor families from food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and
America's other programs that alleviate poverty.
"Welfare," he snarls, as he and his militant lieutenants conduct ruthless
slash-and-burn forays to defund and destroy such benefits. Their rationale
is that eliminating anti-poverty assistance will not only save billions of
tax dollars and reduce the federal budget deficit, but it'll also provide a
morally beneficial incentive for poor people to get jobs and work their way
up to prosperity. Like El Donaldo and his billionaire buddies did.
Uh... actually, Trump inherited a real estate fortune from his Daddy Fred,
and he expanded it by relying on billions of dollars in government
subsidies, tax breaks, and special favors. As for working, most poor people
already have jobs, but it's the miserly pay of those jobs that mire them in
poverty and drudgery. Even more significant is the vicious,
laissez-fairyland sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness that
causes pampered political elites like Trump to be intentionally cruel to the
poor.
Generals plan wars, but it's the battlefield commanders who do the bloody
work. So, let's look at one of Generalissimo Trump's commanders.
Meet Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Ben Carson, a quiet but
bloodstained commandante in General Trump's relentless war against
poverty-stricken Americans. Since taking office, Commandante Carson is
loyally serving in the extreme right wing's ideological mission of
destroying the very idea of housing subsidies for poor families. He has
taken a budget ax to the program that enforces our society's fair housing
laws, and even stripped the words "inclusive" and "free from discrimination"
out of HUD's mission statement.
Such sneak attacks, however, were deemed too subtle by Trump and his
political base of hardcore haters of poverty programs, so the
commander-in-chief demanded a brutal frontal assault on the poorest of the
poor. Carson dutifully delivered, proposing legislation to triple the
monthly rent that the most impoverished of public housing families would pay
-- including increased rents for the elderly and disabled. To add cruelty to
this nastiness, Carson also called for eliminating child care and medical
deductions that public housing families can subtract from their rent
payments.
Commandante Carson has tried to pass off this cold-blooded ambush of real
people as merely a bureaucratic "streamlining," calling it necessary to cut
the federal deficit. That's a despicable ruse, for the deficit was
deliberately and grossly inflated a few months ago -- not by poor people,
but by an exorbitant, tax giveaway passed by Trump and the Republican
Congress for the richest people in America. And let's not forget that Carson
himself was willing to bloat the deficit when he recently tried to spend
taxpayer's money on a $31,000 dining set for his office suite.
So Trump, Carson and GOP congress critters have also added hypocrisy to the
nastiness and cruelty of their ongoing war against the poor. Trump, his
cabinet of multimillionaires and such Koch-headed congressional ideologues
as GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are
so disdainful of the needy that they have a perverse impulse to punish them
-- as though being poor is not punishment enough. It's said that war is
hell, but their war on the poor is truly satanic.
